Physics Outreach

This text and image is taken from a blog post of my friend and colleague Jokondino Okema.  A teacher in the Gulu district of Northern Uganda, Jokondino is inspiring in his efforts to communicate regularly about a wide range of aspects of life in a war-affected, rural and relatively isolated region.  Encouraging voices like Jokondino’s is the work of Global Voices, an organization that catalyzes and supports the deployment of new media to liberate and amplify the voices of those less often heard, especially those disadvantaged by the oppression of free speech. On May 6 and 7 they held their 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile, and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend.

I work with BOSCO, an organization bringing wireless, solar powered, efficient ICT access and collaboration technology training to formerly Internally Displaced Persons of Northern Uganda.  BOSCO was honored by Global Voices, Google and Reuters at this year’s GV Summit as recipient of the first annual Breaking Boarders Award in the technology category. Details are linked below.

What I saw in Santiago was a large number of persons dedicated to revolutionary change in citizen empowerment, riding a powerful new wave of technological support.  I was really honored just to be there.

Breaking Borders Award: Winners announced
Official Google Blog: Honoring those who give voice to the silenced
Global Voices: Announcing the Breaking Borders Award Winners
BOSCO Uganda: Press Release
BOSCO Uganda: Award Acceptance Speech, Archbishop of Gulu, John Baptist Odama

Here are some images (from GV photographers) from the event:

Sunburst, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

I had to pull over to capture this morning sun in mid-April. (Honest…I pulled over.) Just beautiful.

WHSstudentsND, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

I enjoyed this morning’s visit with about 120 or so freshmen from Washington High School in South Bend. They came to Notre Dame at the invitation of Prof. Ani Aprahamian of ND’s Department of Physics. The students heard a variety of talks and saw a number of demonstrations, including a tour through the universe in the Digital Visualization Theatre.

I had the opportunity to take them through an Atomic Force Microscopy visualization of the surface of a device used in compact disc manufacturing. I failed to record any of the pretty cool images we obtained. So I hereby resolve to spend some time with the AFM and post images of a number of sample types. Soon.

WaterSourceMap, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

I’ve been out of the country twice since my last post, and have so many items to post that it’s hard to know where to dive back in. The first point I’d like to make here is that you’ve just got to do it, if you’re going to blog. So I’m back.

The map above is a map of water sources in the north of Uganda as posted by students who are part of BOSCO’s classroom-to-classroom (C2C) project. In February I traveled to Uganda for BOSCO, and was really pleased to be able to help set up this mapping project with equipment secured by a fellow teacher, Ms. Robin Dirksen of Lead-Deadwood High School, South Dakota. In Uganda I worked with a number of teachers; Mr. Jokonino Okema of Lacor in the Gulu district, some of his younger teaching colleagues and their students have taken the lead. The idea is that students in Uganda and elsewhere in the world map their water quality data, and learn with and from one another while doing so. Because we have not yet secured a connection with a water/sanitation partner in Northern Uganda, we are beginning (following experience advice) with an innocuous water hardness reading. Students take this reading, the GPS location, images and stories from the location in the field, and then enter this data in a google form embedded in a project wiki page. The map is generated automatically, courtesy of mapalist.com.

I like a lot of things about this project. One of them is that suite of mapping tools–Google forms and spreadsheets, Mapalist, and Wikispaces–are all free, fairly easy for none-too-technical teachers to use (though I did have to look up a few formatting tricks on the mapalist user’s blog), and easily adaptable to almost any mapping task.

This summer we expect to add middle school students from Notre Dame’s Sensing Our World program to this same project.

Tim Hardt passed away earlier this week. He was a friend, a new member but for the past year a very active member of the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center, an exemplary professional STEM educator. There are many wonderful facets of the life of a good man. I’d like to recall what I know about one such facet: Tim’s professional involvement with the emerging community of professional STEM educators active at Notre Dame.

0206001000a_0001_0001, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This is a cell phone camera of what appear to be a pair of parallel vapor trails in a cloud chamber (a saturated ethanol environment over dry ice.) The question is, what accounts for the parallel tracks which seem to be visible in the image? Is the one an optical reflection of the other? Made how? (The light source is a slide projector set up just to the right of the image, behind a plexiglass wall.) If not a reflection, then what accounts for the two parallel tracks? A nearby common source should have produced events with a common vertex, and thus the only angle from which the lines would appear parallel would be looking down through one line into the other, but that’s not the case here (though perhaps it’s close to that.) Any ideas? The full original image is below.

Seth Godin knows what time it is. Read this set in full screen mode. Be patient with his characterization of education as brainwashing: education and workforce preparation deserve more than a bumper-sticker characterization. When you get to page six of his manifesto, you’ll find some thought-provoking advice. Think of it as a distilled version of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.) How are STEM educators preparing students to contribute in a world like this?

It’s nice when new message and new media come together in the same package. Here’s a presentation on search tips with Google, done with Prezi, an online presentation tool you’re going to want to explore. Spend time with Google using these search tips, and then with Prezi, communicating more effectively what you’ve learned more efficiently.

Following in a long line of exhibitors over at least the past ten consecutive years, QuarkNet and NDeRC faculty, teachers, graduate fellows and undergrads–am I forgetting anyone?–participated in Saint Joseph County Public Library’s Science Alive! event earlier today. The QuarkNet/NDeRC room was full of fun: scanning electron microscopy for seeing surface structure at 9000x; cloud chamber and image intensifying detectors for visualizing cosmic rays; an electron gun surrounded by very low pressure ionizing gas inside a magnetic field for visualizing and measuring the charge/mass ratio an electron beam; zebrafish development under optical microscopes; light transmission using advanced fiber optics; defraction grating observation of emission tube spectra; exploration of the effects of liquid nitrogen cooling on a wide range of ordinary objects; and face painting with ice viewed through the lens of an infrared camera. I grabbed a few images by cell phone amidst the excitement. I didn’t have time to get around to the rest of the exhibits today, but below is the set I took at last year’s event. Be there next year if you can!